Mind Candy

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The Batman needed transportation and weaponry; he had a special powerful car built, the Batmobile, and made himself an array of special gadgets, many using his bat motif.

  The Lone Ranger needed transportation and weapons; he captured the notorious white stallion, Silver, and learned to use a Colt .45 better than any other man alive, loading it with his trademark silver bullets.

  No man is an island, and Batman saw that he couldn’t go it alone. He took on a young partner, Robin, while his trusted butler Alfred tended the home front, looking after the Batcave, his secret headquarters.

  The Lone Ranger didn’t care to go it alone; his faithful Indian companion, Tonto, stayed with him, while his old friend Jim worked the secret silver mine that served as his home base.

  Eventually, Batman caught Joe Chill, who perished in a fusillade of bullets fired by his own comrades. Bruce Wayne did not give up his chosen career, however; there were still other wrongs to be righted.

  Eventually, the Lone Ranger caught up with Butch Cavendish and delivered him to the authorities, but there were still other wrongs to be righted, and he set out to right them.

  That, however, is just about as far as you can push the parallels. Quite far enough, I’d say—but the Batman has no equivalent for Dan Reid, the Lone Ranger’s resourceful nephew, who was rescued from a burning wagon-train as a baby and brought up by a Grandma Frisby. Unless, that is, you take Robin to be equivalent, in which case Tonto remains unaccounted for. And Mrs. Frisby doesn’t quite match up with Mrs. Chilton.

  Also, folks, let’s face it, Bruce Wayne is a man obsessed, a borderline nutcase who has managed to channel his rather violent behavior into a socially-useful form.

  The Lone Ranger, on the other hand, is simply a good man, with a strong streak of Victorian idealism and practicality and nothing better to do with himself.

  Also, the Lone Ranger was not a vigilante; he was a lawman, a Texas Ranger, who happened to work alone. He defended the laws. He was a protector, more than anything else. He was a part of the growth of the American West. The stories I remember best involved him preventing Indian wars—not by wiping out the Indians, as some stories did, but by removing whatever provocation had prompted the war, whether it was a gung-ho cavalry captain infringing on Indian rights, or racist settlers stealing Indian land, or a bloodthirsty Indian brave trying to prove his bravery, or whatever. The Ranger defended the farmer’s barbed-wire fences against the cattlemen. He tracked down bank robbers.

  A similarity I missed before: both Batman and the Lone Ranger were masters of disguise. The Lone Ranger regularly infiltrated outlaw gangs and even tribes of hostile Indians (though for obvious reasons, Tonto was better at the latter).

  Like Batman, he did not kill anybody except in self-defense, and even then he tried to avoid it. He did not wantonly destroy property. Unlike Batman, though, he did not fight mad inventors or world-conquering madmen—not the real Lone Ranger, the one I grew up with, though some of the later versions were less scrupulous about this. The Ranger wasn’t a superhero or an adventurer, just a lawman—and that was quite enough.

  He probably wouldn’t last ten minutes in Gotham City, of course.

  But then, Batman wouldn’t last long in the Old West, either. The two men fit the same basic archetype—an honorable man fighting to defend others—adjusted to fit two different milieus, the Old West and the urban underworld. Alter any part of that and you’ve destroyed the heart of their appeal, in my opinion. Batman belongs on the streets of Gotham, battling muggers and lunatics, just as the Lone Ranger is at his best stopping Indian wars and train robberies. In both cases, the hero’s place is protecting those who have no one else who can help them.

  Incidentally, a third classic hero, far less successful, falls between these two. Around 1940, Britt Reid, son of the Lone Ranger’s nephew Dan Reid, was inspired by his great-uncle’s exploits to become a crime-fighter as the Green Hornet. He, too, appeared in comic books and on the radio and even on TV, but was never the great popular success that either Batman or the Lone Ranger was. I believe that was because he seemed too much like the imitation he was; his car Black Beauty was a hybrid imitation of Silver and the Batmobile, while his Oriental servant Kato (whose exact nationality changed according to the politics of the time) was a hybrid imitation of Tonto and Robin, and so forth. He was created by the originators of the Lone Ranger, but still came off looking like an imitation of Batman. He lacked the compelling reason for his actions that his predecessors had; no one in his family was murdered unless you count his long-dead grandfather, and as a result he seemed more like a playboy indulging a whim than anything else.

  Yes, Bruce Wayne was a playboy, too, but his career as Batman was a lifelong obsession, not a whim.

  There have been other heroes fitting the same template of secret identity, hidden base, wealth devoted to the cause, loyal companions, master of disguise—the Scarlet Pimpernel was perhaps the first, while Zorro even shared the Old West setting with the Lone Ranger—but Batman and the Lone Ranger are, in my opinion, the most similar, and the best.

  A Consideration of Certain Aspects of Vogon Poetry

  Originally published in The Anthology At the End of the Universe

  “Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria…

  “The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.”

  So Douglas Adams tells us at the start of Chapter 7 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He states this as a well-known fact—“Vogon poetry is of course [emphasis added] the third worst in the Universe,” as if there can be no possible doubt.

  This leads to the inevitable conclusion that in the larger galactic society, unlike our own more limited (and perhaps soon to be destroyed for a hyperspatial bypass) viewpoint, there is a widely-accepted method of assigning definitive rankings to the quality of poetry. None of this, “Well, I’ve always been partial to Wordsworth, myself,” or “How can you say that Ferlinghetti is any sort of a poet?” or “I may not have your fancy education, but I know what I like,” that’s so often heard at terrestrial cocktail parties; instead one can presumably assign specific values, and prove once and for all that while Robert Frost can kick Rod McKuen’s arse, e.e. cummings would have them both for breakfast.

  Or perhaps not. After all, that would take a great deal of fun out of literary debate, and put thousands of critics and academics out of work. One would assume that any such system would surely have been suppressed or repudiated for the overall good of society.

  Yet we have that undeniable, “Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe.” How can this be?

  I see one simple solution. It may be that there is a generally-accepted method for determining not quality, but badness—of scoring not how well a poem works, but of what evils it perpetrates. Poetry generally recognized as good would have so few of these markers that distinguishing relative quality remains a matter of taste, and a fit subject for inflicting on long-suffering students or boring one’s fellows at parties, while ranking the very worst would be a simple matter of totting up a few sums and issuing the appropriate warnings.

  One can easily imagine some of the factors that would go into such a system—forced rhymes, limping rhythm, malapropisms, appalling imagery, grotesque grammar, mixed metaphors, strained syntax, absurd alliteration, invented vocabulary, unnecessary repetition, time-worn cliches, unnecessary repetition, inconsistent tenses, mismatched moods, silly similes, historical errors, inevitable misinterpretations, inadvertent ambiguity, inappropriate metaphors, meaningless allusions, run-on sentences, unnecessary repetition, redundant lists, and so on. Indeed, the one fragmentary sample of Vogon poetry to ever be released into Earth’s atmosphere, from the aforementioned Chapter Seven, displays generous amounts of several of these characteristics. It is, at times, hardly recognizable as poetry at all. />
  Which leads to several obvious questions, chief among them being, “How do you know it is poetry, if it’s so dreadful as all that?” After all, these creations apparently fail at everything poetry is ordinarily expected to do.

  Well, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language says poetry is, “The art or work of a poet.” A poet, it says, is “A writer of poems.” It notably does not say that poetry is poems, or need have anything to do with poems, verse, metrical prose, or anything else of that ilk—merely that it’s the work of a poet.

  This leads to the interesting conclusion that if a person (of any species) were to write a few verses, thereby making himself a poet, and then get a job as a plumber, then fixing your stopped-up drain would be poetry.

  It also leads to the interesting conclusion that the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language does not have a very strong grasp on reality, and leaves us with little choice but to throw up our hands and say, “Fine, then, have it your way, it’s poetry.”

  It also leaves one wishing that the Vogons had taken up plumbing, rather than insisting on jamming ill-matched words up against one another, but as Chapter 7 tells us, their poetry was the result of sheer bloody-mindedness; re-seating toilets and stopping faucet leaks just wouldn’t have served their purpose as well. Most people find it much easier to appreciate a good hot shower than a poem, and the Vogons were trying to be difficult.

  (The whole issue of why “difficult” works are so often considered superior to clear and simple ones will not be addressed here, since it’s obviously irrelevant to any discussion of the works of the Vogon masters, who achieved intense difficulty without any hint of superiority whatsoever.)

  All that side, and returning to the issue at hand, since we do have that one sample of a Vogon’s poetical work, and must conclude that galactic civilization does indeed have some means of determining the absolute badness of anything deemed to be poetry, the next question becomes, “How in the Universe can anything be measurably worse than that without degenerating into complete (and harmless) incomprehensibility?”

  We are informed that the Azgoths of Kria produced poetry so hideous that a majority of their listeners did not survive the experience and the poets’ own bodies sometimes rebelled, but no details of the actual content or style are given beyond two of Grunthos’ titles. While I suppose we must be grateful that our mental health has thus been spared, one cannot help but be mildly curious about the exact nature of these Azgothic abominations. How did they manage to convey their utter awfulness so effectively, regardless of the cultural background of their listeners?

  And why was this never weaponized?

  It may be that the military applications were never explored because the Azgoths themselves were affronted by the idea; it clearly could not be accomplished without their cooperation. Copyright considerations aside, any attempt to use Azgothic poetry as weapons of mass destruction without the consent of the Azgoths would inevitably lead to finding oneself on the losing end of an arms race, since the Azgoths, as the originators of the stuff, could produce more and deadlier poetry. Anyone who tried the unauthorized use of Azgothic verse in combat would undoubtedly find himself invited to a private reading by a Krian master, and surely even the most ruthless galactic warlord would not tempt such a fate.

  Yet we are assured that there was at one time an even worse poet than any Azgoth in the Universe—Ms. Paula Jennings of Greenbridge.

  It may seem curious that the very worst poetry should be associated with a single individual, where second and third place are awarded to entire species, but in fact it makes perfect sense. Earth, as we know, was no ordinary planet, but the supercomputer designed by Deep Thought and built by the Magratheans to determine the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The entire human species was to be a part of the computational matrix, and one might therefore reasonably assume that Paula Jennings, a part of the final configuration, was the particular component assigned the unconscious and involuntary task of determining the place of Really Bad Poetry in the universe.

  This theory is complicated, unfortunately, by the fact that Earth had been contaminated two million years before by the arrival of the Golgafrinchan “B” Ark and the extinction of the original native inhabitants, but most of the computer was still there, and presumably it did its best to incorporate the Golgafrinchans’ descendants into its program.

  In fact, it may well be that Ms. Jennings’ Golgafrinchan ancestry was what enabled her to achieve such stunning heights of badness—that the combination of Earth’s determination to model the universe and two million years of Golgafrinchan idiocy resulted in her uniquely hideous accomplishments.

  One wonders how an ordinary Englishwoman could hope to match the sheer vileness of the Vogons and Azgoths—or rather, how she could match it, since there is no indication that she hoped to. In all probability she thought her little verses rather nice, and would have been quite upset to learn that they were galactically bad. Nonetheless, our omniscient narrator assures us that her poetry was indeed more unspeakably awful than any other ever produced.

  One cannot help but wonder whether she ever showed her work to anyone else. As there are no reports of mysterious deaths or fits of madness in the vicinity of Greenbridge, one assumes she did not, but that she, like Emily Dickinson, kept them hidden away, perhaps secretly dreaming of posthumous publication and fame.

  (This begs the question, of course, of how Mr. Adams or anyone else ever learned of Ms. Jennings’ unique distinction, but one of the under-appreciated advantages of an omniscient narrator is that one need never ask how he, she, or it knows anything. He, she, or it just does. Many of us, restricted to first person or perhaps third person limited in our understanding of the universe, envy this. We must rely on direct observation, inference, and logic to learn things, while the omniscient narrator simply knows. It must be quite nice, actually, and should I ever observe, infer, or reason out a way for someone such as myself to obtain such a position, I will not hesitate to apply for it.)

  The exact nature of Jennings’ work and its remarkable badness is unknown. It would seem unlikely that she would make extensive use of the sort of vocabulary Vogons employ, with their gruntbugglies and turlingdromes, but she would almost certainly have used far more saccharine sentimentality than the rather callous Vogons. The Azgoths, from the few hints we are given, may have used sentimentality, as well—perhaps that’s how both Jennings and the Azgoths managed to exceed Vogon awfulness. The Vogons’ own bloody-mindedness may have worked against them there, as mawkish sentimentality is one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of the truly dreadful poet. Vogon poets have unquestionably feigned such attitudes, but surely never believably, thereby failing to deliver that shocking realization, “Oh, my God, she means it!” that has done so much psychic damage to the audiences of bad poets throughout history.

  And speaking of psychic damage, Chapter 7 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy presents us with a curious incident, when Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz reads a sample of his work to Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. Bear with me; this is indeed relevant to Ms. Jennings and the general issue of stupendously bad poetry.

  In any case, Jeltz reads an appalling bit of verse to the forcibly-restrained pair, with deliberate malevolence and malice aforethought.

  Prefect, a native of a small planet near Betelgeuse, despite knowing what to expect, suffers badly under this ghastly assault—spasms, screaming, and so on.

  Dent, an Earthling, presumably a descendant of the Golgafrinchan colonists, comes through the experience much better despite having very little advance warning of just what horrors Vogons are capable of. He is then, within seconds, able to lie to the Vogon’s face—at least, we hope it was a lie—and claim he enjoyed the poem.

  How, we ask, as any sane observer must, is such insouciance as this possible for any thinking being?

  (Arguments as to whether Mr. Dent qualifies as a “thinking being” will be ignored. Save
your breath.)

  Even as we ask, the realization dawns upon us. Obviously, his shared ancestry with the worst poet in the Universe is responsible. As an Englishman, Dent comes from the same genetic pool and cultural background that produced Ms. Jennings; he is a part of the same damaged computational matrix that created her (and the game of cricket, but that’s another issue). As an Englishman, Arthur Dent is therefore partially immune to the horrific effects of truly bad poetry.

  And here we may have an explanation for just how the Vogons came to demolish Earth in the first place. It could be theorized that the hyperspatial bypass was merely a cover story, the loathsomeness of cricket just incidental—the true reason was that they feared what might happen if Earth completed its task, galactic society learned the question to Life, the Universe, and Everything, and thousands of Englishmen, no longer needed as part of history’s greatest computer, were unleashed on the galaxy. Somehow, the Vogons had found out that Englishmen were immune to their poetry, and they dreaded the possibility, however faint it might be, that these creatures might teach other people how to enjoy Vogon poetry.

  That would put an end to a major form of Vogon amusement, and render powerless perhaps their greatest threat. The Azgoths never intentionally used their poetry as a weapon, but the Vogons certainly used theirs—not in large-scale wars, but in small-scale personal situations, such as interrogating or torturing prisoners. The mere threat of a Vogon poetry reading was regularly used to keep other species in line.

  Just imagine how Vogons might react to learning that there were people out there who did not find Vogon poetry horrifyingly bad, but rather laughably bad! Clearly, it would have meant the end of Vogon civilization—or at any rate of a great deal of Vogon fun. Earth obviously had to be destroyed, and the sooner the better.